http://blog.booking.com/abstracting_binlog_servers_and_mysql_master_promotion_wo_reconfiguring_slaves.html

Follow the link above to read my latest article on the Booking.com Developer Blog.  It is about Binlog Servers and how to promote a slave as the new master without reconfiguring all slaves.

This is also a good opportunity to remind you of my next talks:

I’ll be giving a talk about Binlog

There are cases where we need to implement MySQL partitioning, or at least test if it is an option to solve an issue. However, how are we able to test it when the table on our production environment has hundreds of millions of rows, several composite indexes and/or the size on disk is hundreds of gigabytes?

Testing environments usually don’t have all the data that production has and if they have, probably you are not testing all the use-cases at a database level. Therefore, is it possible to test MySQL Partitioning on production impacting as less as possible?

When we execute pt-online-schema-change, it creates a table, triggers, and then copies the data. As we are going to test partitioning we are going to need both tables – with and without partitioning – and we are going to use triggers to keep both tables consistent. A good thing about changing a table to use partitioning is that, usually, …

Originally Posted by Adam Bird

There needed to be a better way for agents in Zendesk to track the tasks that had been assigned them. Using the Cronofy calendar API we created an app that keeps those assignments synchronized with the agent’s calendar.

This post shares our learnings from interacting with the Zendesk API, hopefully to help you with your own Zendesk project.

The Ruby source code for our integration is also available.

When a Ticket is a Task

Tickets are the core entity in the Zendesk domain. Tasks are just Tickets of type : ‘task’. This gives them an additional attribute due_at.

We also need to track the status of the ticket to know when it’s …

There needed to be a better way for agents in Zendesk to track the tasks that had been assigned them. Using the Cronofy calendar API we created an app that keeps those assignments synchronized with the agent's calendar.

This post shares our learnings from interacting with the Zendesk API, hopefully to help you with your own Zendesk project.

The Ruby source code for our integration is also available.

When a Ticket is a Task

Tickets are the core entity in the Zendesk domain. Tasks are just Tickets of type : 'task'. This gives them an additional attribute due_at.

We also need to track the …

Thanks to everyone who joined us for our recent live webinar on ‘Schema Changes for MySQL Replication & Galera Cluster’ led by Krzysztof Książek, Senior Support Engineer at Severalnines. The replay and slides to the webinar are now available to watch and read online via the links below.

Watch the replay

Become a MySQL DBA - Webinars - Schema Changes for MySQL Replication & Galera Cluster (Replay) from Severalnines AB

Read the slides

Become a MySQL …

I recently gave Terraform a test drive, using HP Cloud (Openstack-based) as the cloud provider, and have to say I was pleasantly surprised that it was one of these “just works” types of tools.

Why??

I am a member of HP Cloud’s Advanced Technology Group and an important part of our mission is to look for new technologies and exciting new trends. One project I was asked to look at is Terraform. What is Terraform? A project by HashiCorp that is for “building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently”. From my experience, it’s a logical way of setting up virtual resources that supports multiple sources.

Installing Terraform

Installing and setting up Terraform was extremely simple and straightforward, and I was able to get up and running rather quickly, …

Percona Server 5.6.21+ and MySQL 5.7.8+ offer the super_read_only option that was first implemented in WebscaleSQL. Unlike read_only, this option prevents all users from running writes (even those with the SUPER privilege). Sure enough, this is a great feature, but what’s the relation with GTID? Read on!

TL;DR

Enabling super_read_only on all slaves when using GTID replication makes your topology far less sensitive to errant transactions. Failover is then easier and safer because creating errant transactions is much harder.

GTID replication is awesome…

For years, all MySQL DBAs in the world have been fighting with positioning when working with replication. Each time you move a slave from one master to another, you must be very careful to start …

The MySQL Fabric team is pleased to announce that a new (GA) release is now available. This release includes several improvements in terms of stability and usability (bug fixes and feature enhancements). In a nutshell:

• Two new types of users for backup and restore are now available allowing a better managements of the required privileges for each user type.

…

The MySQL Fabric team is pleased to announce that a new (GA) release is now available. This release includes several improvements in terms of stability and usability (bug fixes and feature enhancements). In a nutshell:

• Two new types of users for backup and restore are now available allowing a better managements of the required privileges for each user type. More information: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.5/en/fabric-create-user.html 
• An example script for pacemaker was added to the source packages to help provide an HA solution using a single Fabric node. More information: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/mysql-utilities/1.5/en/fabric-pacemaker.html
• The Connector/Python minimum …

In Python it is easily possible to findout the name of a Unicode character and findout some properties about that character. The module which does that is called unicodedata.

An example:

>>> import unicodedata
>>> unicodedata.name('☺')
'WHITE SMILING FACE'

This module uses the data as released in the UnicodeData.txt file from the unicode.org website.

So if UnicodeData.txt is a 'database', then we should be able to import it into MySQL and use it!

I wrote a small Python script to automate this. The basic steps are:

• Download UnicodeData.txt
• Create a unicodedata.ucd table
• Use LOAD DATA LOCAL INFILE to load the data

This isn't difficult especially because the file doesn't have the actual characters in it. It is …